On this day, several years ago, I left the Countess of Chester Hospital with my wife and newborn son. We did the usual things that people do after leaving the hospital with a new baby. We went to the McDonald’s drive-through in nearby Cheshire Oaks. We discussed how ridiculous it was that a member of staff had insisted on accompanying us to the car to ensure that we had a correctly fitted child seat.
Then, we went home to begin that magical few months of sleep deprivation where you’re never entirely sure whether you’re asleep or awake. When I think about the whole experience now, especially during the night, I will often get out of bed, walk to my little boy’s room, and just stand there for a while, thinking about how lucky we were.
Many other expecting couples who checked into the Countess of Chester Hospital were not so lucky. Because you see, this hospital contained a monster: a nurse who was assigned to work with the most vulnerable individuals was, it transpires, actually working ceaselessly behind the scenes to make sure that not everybody left the hospital with a healthy child, as we were fortunate enough to do.
In today’s article, we will take a look at exactly who this monster was, what she did, and the catalogue of alleged errors that allowed her to continue uninterrupted for so long.
Who is Lucy Letby?
Unlike many of the criminals we cover here, there were no early red flags that might indicate what Letby would become. Born in 1990, she grew up in Hereford, the only child in a stereotypically middle-class family. She attended the local comprehensive school before going on to study nursing at university.
After completing her studies, she moved to Chester, where she underwent another three years of training to become a children’s nurse. During this time, she worked as a student nurse at both the Countess of Chester and the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. After becoming a fully qualified nurse, she gained full-time employment at the latter in 2011.
During her first years working there, she was described as both hard-working and sociable but, and this is important, not unusually remarkable in any way. One article produced by ITV described her as: “nothing out of the ordinary,” a “beige” character – even a “girl next door,” affable, and charming. Even after babies began dying at a disproportionate rate on her watch, people in charge had a hard time pursuing or even believing concerns that were raised against her.
After all, she was just Lucy, the lovely nurse who worked in the neonatal unit.
Much later, during her trial, Dr. Shoham Das, a criminal psychologist, said: “One thing that really strikes me about Lucy Letby’s case is that there is no known history of previous offending, specifically no known history of previous violence. Having assessed hundreds of mentally distressed offenders, I would say that’s exceptionally rare. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my career before.”
I know I keep bringing this up, but it perhaps goes some way to explaining why her horrific crimes went undetected for so long.
The Killing Spree
On the 8th of June 2015, two twins, who, to protect their anonymity, we shall refer to as child A and child B, were born six weeks premature at the Countess of Chester Hospital. Although premature, staff at the hospital had no reason to believe that, given time and appropriate medical care, they would not eventually go home with their families and lead perfectly healthy lives. Sadly, Letby had other ideas.
Thirty minutes after she came on duty for the night shift, child A deteriorated rapidly and unexpectedly. Ninety minutes after she started work, he was dead. Prior to this child’s death, Letby had alerted both a doctor and a consultant to unusual patches of discoloration on his skin. In reality, she was completely aware of why this was, but appears to have wanted to cover up what she had done by showing concern and involving others.
Almost immediately after coming on duty, Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of child A, causing an IV air embolism and deliberately murdering the first vulnerable human in her care. After going off shift, she sent the following message to a colleague: “Dad was on the floor crying, saying please don’t take our baby away when I took him to the mortuary, it’s just heart-breaking. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Although you might think that sending such a message is not particularly unusual, she did something else as well. Something that she did almost every time she took a life. She repeatedly searched on Facebook for the parents of Child A. It was later claimed that she did this as some sort of perverse attempt to fully experience what she had done, almost as if she was thriving on the grief of those left behind.
Understandably, the parents of child A were utterly crushed. But they still had a surviving child, and at least one member of the family is said to have stood watch by her bedside for the entire day. However, when the “lovely” children’s nurse came back on duty that night, they appear to have relaxed a little. I imagine that they will regret this relaxation for the rest of their lives.
Twenty-eight hours after murdering child A, Letby injected child B with air. This time, she was not so lucky. The alarm was sounded and, after being resuscitated, her second victim would make a full recovery. Now, you might think that if one baby had died on your watch and a second baby nearly died the next day, you might want to take a bit of a break or, at the very least, take on alternative or lighter duties for a bit. Not Letby.
Three days after her first murder, she sent a text message to her manager asking to pick up extra shifts: “From a confidence point of view, I need to take an ITU baby soon X.”
On the 14th of June, she had another text message conversation with a colleague during which she sent the following message: “I just keep thinking about Mon (death of Child A). Feel like I need to be in (room) 1 to overcome it… to get the image out of my head. It probably sounds odd, but it’s how I feel.”
Less than 10 minutes after this conversation reached its conclusion, another alarm sounded within the hospital. Despite not being the designated nurse, Letby was discovered standing over the monitoring equipment for child C. Tragically, child C would also die. The cause? Air injected into his stomach by Letby.
Just eight days later on the 22nd of June, she would strike again.
Using the same method that had proved so effective with child A, Letby injected air into the bloodstream of a baby girl. Once again, the alarm was sounded as child D collapsed. Although she would make a brief recovery, she would collapse twice more with the last incident being fatal.
Other medical professionals who attended during the resuscitation attempts noticed the same patches of skin discolouration that appeared on child A, but failed to link the two cases.
In a further attempt to garner sympathy from her colleagues as well as to cover up her aberrant acts, Letby sent the following message the very next day:
“On a day to day basis it’s an incredible job with so many positives. But sometimes I think, how do such sick babies get through & others just die so suddenly and unexpectedly? Guess it’s how it’s meant to be… I think there is an element of fate involved. There is a reason for everything.”
At this point, you might well be reasonably wondering, “Why has nobody noticed all these strange deaths?” Well, as it turned out, people had noticed. Shortly after the death of child D, Dr.
Stephen Brearey, the head consultant in the neonatal unit, carried out a review of the three unusual deaths in June. As part of his findings, he informed Alison Kelly, the Director of Nursing and Deputy Chief Executive, that Letby was the only nurse on duty during each of the deaths. Not only does it appear that his concerns were dismissed, but he has since told the BBC Panorama that it seemed the hospital was looking for any way out that would not involve the police.
When asked if he believed there had been a cover-up, he responded by saying: “I don’t know how you define a cover-up, but to us, the evidence in front of us was quite clear. It felt like they’d tried to engineer a narrative, some way out of this which didn’t involve the police. If you want to call that a cover-up, then that’s a cover-up.”
He would go on to say: “It’s something that nobody really wants to consider: that a member of staff might be harming the babies under their care. Some of the babies didn’t respond to resuscitation as we would have expected. In those cases, babies would usually regain a normal heart rate and improved breathing, but that didn’t happen in these cases, as we’d expect, which was unusual.
It was quite surreal because as a group, our concerns were rising. There was no communication from senior managers in the trust.”
You might think that, even if there was the slightest suspicion that one of the nurses at the hospital might have been murdering babies, those in charge would have, at the very least, taken the precaution of moving her somewhere else or temporarily placing her in an administrative role. But no, not only was Letby allowed to continue working with vulnerable babies, but Brearey and a number of other consultants were forced to apologize to her and threatened with “consequences” if they did not immediately drop the matter. Unfortunately for Letby’s future victims, they capitulated, and she received the following letter: “Dear Lucy, we would like to apologize for any inappropriate comments that may have been made during this difficult period.
We are very sorry for the stress and upset that you have experienced in the last year. Please be reassured that patient safety has been our absolute priority during this difficult time.” While I’m sure that everybody involved will forever wish they had pursued the matter, had they tried a little harder, then several lives would have been spared.
Perhaps more concerningly, had Letby simply stopped at this point, there is an extremely high likelihood that she would never have been caught.
Presumably brimming with confidence after having gotten away with no fewer than three murders, Letby still decided to take a short break. However, on the third of August 2015, she struck again. Child E was born seven weeks premature, along with his twin brother, Child F, and weighed less than 1.4 kg (3 lbs).
In a heartbreaking twist of fate, his mother very nearly caught Letby in the act. When dropping off expressed breast milk for her twins, she came across the nurse standing with her baby. Her young boy had fresh blood around his mouth and appeared to be in extreme distress.
When she asked what was wrong with him, Letby said that the blood was just a result of his feeding tube rubbing against his throat and that she shouldn’t worry about it. Unfortunately, she took her word for it, as well as her advice to take the opportunity to get some rest. After all, they would be leaving for a different hospital the next day because both babies were making such remarkable progress.
Two hours after that, doctors were fighting to save Child E. This tiny, premature baby had lost about a quarter of the blood in his body. Shortly after 1 am, doctors would lose the fight, and he would slip away.
The bleed that had taken his life was a direct result of Letby roughly interfering with the feeding tube in his nose.
So devastated was the mother by her loss, she allowed the murderer to wash her deceased Child before taking it down to the morgue. Next, Letby turned to the other twin, child F. This time, presumably in an attempt to prevent a pattern from emerging, she attempted a different strategy.
Shortly after child F was born, he had been prescribed a tiny amount of insulin to help regulate his blood sugar levels. This provided Letby with an excellent opportunity. She laced his fluid bag with a huge overdose of insulin and also added some to the replacement bag that would be given to the child later.
These combined doses would have undoubtedly been enough to kill him. Fortunately, when it became obvious that this next baby was in trouble, doctors swapped the fluid bags and, when it made no difference, they removed them entirely. Once insulin was no longer entering the child’s body at an alarming rate, he began to recover quickly.
Later tests showed that Child F had “extremely high” insulin levels along with very low C-peptide levels in his blood. It was conclusive proof that someone had given him a large unprescribed dose of insulin and that a poisoner was at work. In an oversight, the magnitude of which is difficult to describe using only words, when these test results came back to the ward a couple of weeks later, doctors did not immediately register the significance, and the murderer was still permitted to remain at large.
So how can this possibly have happened?
According to an article in The Guardian: “One senior doctor who analyzed Letby’s victims said they were selected carefully, not chosen at random. Almost all had other vulnerabilities, such as extreme prematurity or inherited conditions, that gave her plausible deniability when they died. Deaths on the unit, although rare, were described by doctors as ‘expected and explainable.’ Babies’ very presence on a neonatal unit meant they were incredibly fragile, and Letby’s victims were often the most vulnerable of these: the majority required round-the-clock intensive care treatment, rather than just needing feeding and monitoring.”
Even so, if we take into account that several senior doctors were already incredibly suspicious, it seems implausible that nobody would have connected these events. Between September 2015 and June 2016, Letby would murder, or attempt to murder, another 10 babies, mostly by injecting air into the bloodstream or stomachs. On the 24th of June, Dr.
Brearey contacted the hospital’s duty executive, Karen Rees, insisting that Letby must immediately be removed from the ward. Even with the mountain of evidence now stacked against the nurse, Rees insisted that she was safe to work and would take personal responsibility for any more mysterious deaths that occurred. It appears that Brearey was not going to take no for an answer this time because she was finally moved to a clerical role within the hospital.
Unfortunately, this clerical role was in the Risk and Patient Safety Office, where she not only had access to sensitive documents from the neonatal ward but was also working in close proximity with senior managers whose job it would have been to investigate her. Later that same year, the Countess of Chester Hospital stopped accepting babies born before 32 weeks of pregnancy were up. This was apparently partly due to the increase in infant mortality rates.
An independent review was carried out by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health along with the Royal College of Nursing, but this review was unable to pinpoint one single cause for the increase in mortality rates. In 2017, the hospital finally contacted the police. In a statement, they said this was to “seek assurances that enable us to rule out unnatural causes of death.”
On the 3rd of July 2018, one year after the police investigation began, Letby was arrested on suspicion of murdering eight babies and attempting to murder a further six.
The Investigation
Once the police became involved, perhaps because they were not protecting their own interests, the evidence against our infamous Nurse quickly began to mount. When the police searched her property, they came across a number of interesting things. In a bag under her bed, she had many of the handover sheets related to her victims.
For those of you who don’t know, I certainly didn’t, handover sheets contain confidential information about patients and are given to nurses at the start of every shift. These documents are not supposed to leave the hospital. In all, she had stolen 21 of these documents along with the results of a blood test from one of her victims.
In addition to these, she had, in a special box that she had decorated with roses, a further 99 such handover sheets relating to different babies that she had treated all the way back to when she was a student. Further searching revealed handwritten resuscitation notes on many of her victims, along with a diary which, among other things, contained a message that read: “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them,” “I am a horrible evil person,” and in capital letters “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.”
But perhaps the most despicable thing that she had kept was found by the police officers who examined her mobile phone. Apart from discovering that she had repeatedly searched for the parents of her victims on social media, including on Christmas Day, she had taken a photograph of a condolence card that she sent to the parents of one of her victims. It simply read, “Sorry I couldn’t be there to say goodbye.”
The phone also contained a photograph of a thank-you card that she had been sent by the family of one of the babies that she murdered.
These people truly believed that she had done everything in her power to help and, even in their darkest hour, a time when you really don’t want to speak to anybody about anything, they had made an effort to express their gratitude. All of this evidence could be, and was, used against her in her trial.
Trial, Conviction, and Sentencing
As the trial began, many people were particularly interested in finding out just what could have led such an outwardly normal individual to commit such heinous crimes. Although she had constantly claimed to be innocent, just how would she react when confronted with both the evidence found in her house and the reams of medical evidence?
Well, according to Judith Moritz, a BBC News journalist who sat through the entire trial, she did not really react at all. In an article published on the BBC website, she wrote: “My berth on the press bench was no more than five meters away from Letby’s seat. Every so often, I’d look across at the nurse, to try to catch a glimpse of character. As bereaved parents recounted the horrors of watching their children die, the nurse maintained a neutral expression.
No matter how emotionally charged the evidence was, she sat passively.”
For both the sake of the families and those reading, I am not going to provide too many of the more distressing details, but I feel it is necessary to include some of the testimony given by the parents of the victims. The following witness statement is from the mother of the twins, child A and child B, and provides a rough idea of just what needless suffering the families experienced. These children, if you remember, were born six weeks premature.
This is only an extract from the statement as much of it refers to things that are not relevant to the case. The mother had an emergency caesarean section as her blood pressure levels were high, and the twins were delivered. Afterwards, the doctor was “surprised” at how well she was doing, and the mother asked if she could see her children.
She was told that once she was well enough to sit in a chair, she would be taken to see them. As time passed, she said: “I was getting a little anxious as I just wanted to see my children.” It was about 12-1 pm on June 8 when she went to see Child A and B, who were both in incubators.
She stayed with the twins for about an hour and was told to rest on the advice of the nursing staff back in her room. At about 8 pm, a male member of staff came into the room. “You need to come in quickly, there is something wrong with twin 2.”
“All I can remember is coming in and seeing what felt like hundreds of people trying to resuscitate [Child A].”
The mom was asked for permission by medical staff to stop resuscitative attempts. “I couldn’t bring myself to say stop. The only thing I could bring myself to do was nod my head.
One of the things that upsets me the most is I never had the chance to hold him in my arms.” After saying goodbyes to Child A, upon her return, she was asked if she wanted to hold Child B, who couldn’t be out of the incubator for a prolonged period of time. “I felt joy and sadness at the same time.”
At 11:55 am, the couple were woken up by a female member of staff to come quickly to see Child B. She said: “My heart sank - not my baby, not again.” They were told Child B had suffered a similar situation to Child A but had stabilized.
The statement goes on to say that the mother was told by hospital staff that it was likely that the death of her child and near-death of her other child was caused by her pre-existing blood condition. Of course, this information would later prove to be incorrect.
Although the trial started in October, according to Moritz, it wasn’t until February that this callous murderer showed even a hint of emotion. However, this emotion was not brought on by a particularly harrowing piece of witness testimony but by the voice of a doctor with whom she was alleged to be having an affair. Although she would be moved to tears on a few occasions, it was only when aspects of her life or her feelings were revealed to the court. In fact, when the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, began cross-examining her, one of the first questions he asked was: “Is there any reason that you cry when you talk about yourself, but you don’t cry when talking about these dead and seriously injured children?”
Given that the prosecution had a pretty much rock-solid case, complete with documented medical evidence, expert witness testimony, and, potentially, a written confession, the defense, at least in my non-legally trained opinion, appeared to be fairly weak. Benjamin Myers KC attempted to explain away the notes that Letby had written that we mentioned earlier by saying:
“It is a note written in anguish and despair. She was ‘going through a grievance procedure’ with the NHS at the time and knew what was being said about her before her arrest. The allegations were ‘destructive’. The note is headed ‘not good enough’. It does not say ‘guilty’.”
Now, to be fair to him, this is probably the strongest part of his case. You could very reasonably argue that somebody who was genuinely struggling with the loss of so many patients might well start to believe that it was their fault even if it were not. However, that is where the plausible part of his argument ends in my opinion.
As for how the defense explained away the substantial body of other evidence, Myers appeared to fall back on one of the oldest “get out of jail free” gambits of all time. It was all a massive coincidence! Letby being present during every incident?
A coincidence. Letby quite literally being caught in the act? A coincidence.
The fact that, after Letby was removed from the neonatal ward, these inexplicable deaths stopped and, since then, there have only been one or two premature baby deaths? A coincidence. Again, this is only my opinion, but you might be able to explain away two or three such instances as a coincidence, but when you start getting into double digits, the likelihood of that being the case becomes almost negligible.
As for exactly what Letby was doing with all that hospital paperwork at her house, she genuinely told the court that she collected paper and that explains it. The very last thing I want to do is treat this case with anything less than the gravity it deserves, but some of these arguments are, at best, ridiculous.
In this case, my opinion doesn’t matter in the slightest.
However, the opinion that did matter was that of a jury made up of 12 of her peers. So, what did they think? Was Lucy Letby a kind, hard-working, conscientious nurse who had the misfortune to fall foul of an extraordinary run of unfortunate coincidences? Or was she a cold, calculating psychopath who used her prodigious medical skill to go on a killing spree that lasted for the better part of a year?
After deliberating for more than 100 hours, the foreman of the jury delivered the verdict. Letby was found guilty of seven murders and the attempted murder of six others at the Countess of Chester hospital’s neonatal unit between June 2015 and June 2016. In actual fact, the verdict was delivered in three stages, but that was the final result.
Carrying out the ultimate act of disrespect to the families, Letby refused to come up from the cells to hear the final verdict. As the court was adjourned for the weekend with sentencing scheduled to take place on the 21st of August, Letby was returned to prison. I imagine that, forefront in her mind, were the words of the prosecutor during his final speech to the court. During the summing up, he requested that, due to the severity of the offenses, the early release option for life sentences be removed and that Letby spend the rest of her natural life behind bars.
On the day of sentencing, Letby once again refused to attend court. The judge’s sentencing remarks were lengthy, but I have included a few of the key points.
“The defendant, Lucy Letby, has refused to attend court for this sentence hearing. Accordingly, I have to sentence her in her absence. I shall deliver the sentencing remarks as if she was present to hear them, and I direct that she is provided with a transcript of my remarks and copies of the Victim Personal Statements read to the court.”
“You acted in a way that was completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies and in gross breach of the trust that all citizens place in those who work in the medical and caring professions. The babies you harmed were born prematurely, and some were at risk of not surviving, but in each case, you deliberately harmed them intending to kill them. In your evidence, you said that ‘hurting a baby is completely against everything that being a nurse is,’ as, indeed, it should be.
You also claimed you never did anything that was meant to hurt a baby and only ever did your best to care for them. That was but one of the many lies you were found to have told in this case.”
“It is no part of my function to reach conclusions as to the underlying reason or reasons for your actions. Nor could I, for they are known only to you. I must pass appropriate sentences according to law, addressing the seriousness of your offenses.”
“Lucy Letby, on each of the 7 offenses of murder and the 7 offenses of attempted murder, I sentence you to imprisonment for life. Because the seriousness of your offenses is exceptionally high, I direct that the early release provisions do not apply. The order of the court, therefore, is a whole life order on each and every offense, and you will spend the rest of your life in prison.”
So, that ends the story of Britain’s most prolific child killer in legal history. Never again will she be in a position from which she can hurt another child. However, there are a few questions that remain.
Arguably, the most important question is: How? How was this allowed to happen? How is it that seven experienced and well-respected consultants were ignored, brushed off, and eventually threatened with a referral to the General Medical Council when they raised concerns about the conduct of a nurse?
I have given this matter serious consideration and have arrived at two conclusions. Firstly, and most concerningly, the management of the Countess of Chester Hospital during this period was deeply flawed, bordering on negligent. There is simply no way that so many babies should have been able to die unexpectedly without a proper, thorough investigation being carried out.
Even if suspicions had been raised by another nurse or even a member of the public, it should have been thoroughly looked into. The hospital has claimed that new systems are in place and better lines of communication have been established between doctors and managerial staff, but I imagine that is of very little comfort to the families of the victims. Secondly, no matter what else she might be, Letby is something akin to an evil genius.
She deceived her family, her friends, her colleagues, and her superiors. There is no doubt in my mind that the main reason she was able to get away with it for so long was that everybody fell for her perfectly crafted persona. Nobody likes to admit that they were wrong about somebody, and she was such a good actor that the idea of lovely Nurse Lucy being a baby-murdering serial killer was so unpleasant for those who thought they knew her that they began to, perhaps even subconsciously, refuse to see evidence that should have been obvious.
As I said earlier, if she had stopped after the third murder, she would probably still be at large to this day. It really does make you wonder how many people—people who were perhaps a little more careful—have completely gotten away with similar crimes in the past.
Key Takeaways
- Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse with no prior criminal history, murdered seven babies and attempted to murder six others at Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.
- Hospital management dismissed repeated concerns from senior consultants, forced them to apologize to Letby, and delayed contacting police for years despite mounting evidence.
- Letby targeted vulnerable premature infants using methods like air embolisms and insulin overdoses, then searched victims’ parents on social media and kept stolen medical documents.
- Police discovered handwritten confessions, stolen patient records, and photographs of condolence cards in Letby’s home after her 2018 arrest.
- A jury convicted Letby after 100+ hours of deliberation; she received a whole life order but refused to attend her own sentencing hearing.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Lucy Letby and what was her background before becoming a nurse?
Lucy Letby was born in 1990 and grew up in Hereford as the only child in a stereotypically middle-class family. She attended the local comprehensive school before studying nursing at university. After completing her studies, she moved to Chester for three more years of training to become a children’s nurse, working as a student nurse at both the Countess of Chester and Liverpool Women’s Hospital. She became fully qualified and gained full-time employment at Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2011.
She was described as hard-working, sociable, and unremarkable—a ‘beige’ character, ‘girl next door,’ affable, and charming.
What methods did Lucy Letby use to harm babies in the neonatal unit?
Lucy Letby used several methods to harm babies: injecting air into the bloodstream (causing IV air embolism), injecting air into the stomachs, roughly interfering with feeding tubes causing fatal bleeding, and lacing fluid bags with insulin overdoses. She mostly used air injection into the bloodstream or stomachs, but varied her methods to avoid creating a detectable pattern.
How did Lucy Letby behave after harming babies, and what did she do that raised concerns?
After harming babies, Letby repeatedly searched for the parents of her victims on Facebook, including on Christmas Day, which was described as a perverse attempt to fully experience what she had done and thrive on the grief of those left behind. She also sent messages to colleagues expressing false sympathy, such as describing a father’s grief when she took a baby to the mortuary. She collected confidential handover sheets and medical documents related to her victims, keeping them at her home. She also sent condolence cards to parents and kept thank-you cards from families who believed she had tried to help their babies.
What evidence was found in Lucy Letby’s home during the police investigation?
Police found multiple items in Letby’s home: 21 handover sheets related to her victims stolen from the hospital, results of a blood test from one victim, 99 additional handover sheets in a rose-decorated box relating to babies she had treated dating back to her student days, handwritten resuscitation notes on many victims, and a diary containing messages such as ‘I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them,’ ‘I am a horrible evil person,’ and ‘I AM EVIL I DID THIS.’ Her phone contained photographs of condolence and thank-you cards, as well as evidence of repeated social media searches for victims’ parents.
How did hospital management respond when doctors raised concerns about Lucy Letby?
Hospital management repeatedly dismissed or ignored concerns. After three unusual deaths in June 2015, Dr. Stephen Brearey informed Alison Kelly, the Director of Nursing and Deputy Chief Executive, that Letby was the only nurse on duty during each death, but his concerns were dismissed. Brearey stated the hospital seemed to be looking for any way out that would not involve police, and that it felt like they tried to ‘engineer a narrative.’
Consultants were forced to apologize to Letby and threatened with ‘consequences’ and referral to the General Medical Council if they did not drop the matter. Even when Dr. Brearey insisted Letby be removed in June 2016, Karen Rees initially insisted she was safe to work and would take personal responsibility for any more deaths.
What was Lucy Letby’s demeanor during her trial?
According to BBC News journalist Judith Moritz, who sat through the entire trial, Letby maintained a neutral expression throughout most of the proceedings. No matter how emotionally charged the evidence was, including bereaved parents recounting their children’s deaths, she sat passively. She showed emotion only when aspects of her own life or feelings were revealed, particularly when a doctor with whom she was alleged to be having an affair testified. When cross-examined, the prosecutor noted that she cried when talking about herself but not when discussing dead and seriously injured children.
What was Lucy Letby’s defense strategy during her trial?
Defense barrister Benjamin Myers KC attempted to explain away Letby’s handwritten notes by arguing they were ‘written in anguish and despair’ while she was going through a grievance procedure and knew what was being said about her. He claimed the note was headed ‘not good enough’ and did not say ‘guilty.’ For other evidence, the defense relied heavily on coincidence—Letby being present during every incident, being caught in the act, and the deaths stopping after her removal were all presented as coincidences. Regarding the stolen hospital paperwork at her home, Letby claimed she simply collected paper.
What was Lucy Letby’s sentence, and how did she respond to it?
Lucy Letby was found guilty of seven murders and seven attempted murders. The judge sentenced her to imprisonment for life on each offense, with a whole life order meaning she will spend the rest of her life in prison with no possibility of early release. Letby refused to attend court for both the final verdict delivery and the sentencing hearing, requiring the judge to sentence her in her absence.
Why was Lucy Letby able to continue harming babies for so long without being stopped?
Several factors allowed Letby to continue: her outwardly normal, unremarkable persona made her crimes unimaginable to colleagues; she carefully selected vulnerable babies with pre-existing conditions, giving her plausible deniability; hospital management was deeply flawed and appeared to avoid involving police, even dismissing concerns from seven consultants; and there was no known history of previous offending or violence, which criminal psychologist Dr. Shoham Das described as exceptionally rare. The author concludes she was ‘something akin to an evil genius’ who deceived everyone, and that if she had stopped after three murders, she likely would never have been caught.
What changes occurred at the Countess of Chester Hospital as a result of the increased infant mortality?
In 2016, the Countess of Chester Hospital stopped accepting babies born before 32 weeks of pregnancy, apparently partly due to the increase in infant mortality rates. An independent review was carried out by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health along with the Royal College of Nursing, but this review was unable to pinpoint one single cause for the increase. The hospital eventually contacted police in 2017 to ‘seek assurances that enable us to rule out unnatural causes of death.’ The hospital has since claimed that new systems are in place and better lines of communication have been established between doctors and managerial staff.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Lucy Letby: The Serial Killer Nurse
- Hero image source by Adbh266 / openverse, by-sa.
